ABSTRACT

Indigenous western bumblebee populations are just one of many more-than-human others that have become vulnerable in the Anthropocene to what environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose terms double death. Storying worldings also draws attention to the particularities of the emergent assemblage of children and bumblebees, as well as its multiple and contingent material–discursive relations. Bee–plant–human interspecies relationships have also emerged through intentional practices of resource making as western bumblebees and other bee species have been drawn into global capital networks and large-scale agricultural production, where they have been commercially bred as greenhouse crop pollinators. Indigenous bumblebees are believed to have acquired parasitic diseases from bees bred in Europe and then shipped to North America for crop pollination. Educators also conducted their own research, such as in reaching out to a western bumblebee researcher at the local university who presented a seminar about the entangled factors that were impacting western bumblebees in British Columbia.